Fashion/Fiction: Madame Bovary, The Sun Also Rises, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Since books really are some of my favorite items in the world and one of my few requirements for my dream home is that it have a room dedicated to being a library, I thought I'd bring back the Fashion/Fiction post from before and maybe even make it a series. However, this time there's a bit more variety in the eras during which the passages below were written and, as a result,  more variety in the descriptions. Since no one trend rules the runway each year and this year there are movements towards both minimalism and opulence, towards utilitarian dressing and towards military styles, a variety is not only more interesting, but also more accurate.

The first passage echoes the opulence that the Prada and Louis Vuitton collections embody but also teases the impracticality of such clothes, particularly as this scene is set at a wedding on a farm:

"The ladies, wearing bonnets, had on dresses in the town fashion, gold watch chains, pelerines with the ends tucked into belts, or little coloured fichus fastened down behind with a pin, and that left the back of the neck bare. The lads, dressed like their papas, seemed uncomfortable in their new clothes (many that day handselled their first pair of boots), and by their sides, speaking never a word, wearing the white dress of their first communion lengthened for the occasion, were some big girls of fourteen or sixteen, cousins or elder sister no doubt, rubicund, bewildered, their hair greasy with rose-pomade, and very much afraid of dirtying their gloves." 

- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, 1856

 

The Sun Also Rises is in my top five favorite books. It's probably the only book I can say that about given that the list changes constantly depending on my mood but this one is up there regardless. The description of Brett's outfit is sparse because, afterall, Hemingway wrote it but the materials and fabrics seem to resonate with fashion today. Wool, jersey, tweed are all back this year but the most striking part of the description is how Brett has curves and she flaunts and emphasizes them, something the fashion world is only starting to come around to now.

"Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey." 

- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, 1926

  

I have to admit that the first time I read Their Eyes Were Watching God I hated it but that was most likely because I was thirteen and anything I had to read for school and then spend hours picking apart and analyzing and writing up close readings of was akin to prison. I went back to it senior year of high school though and the first chapter in particular struck a chord inside me that made me appreciate the novel much more. Here, the character of Janie first appears and I thought the reflection of how her clothes cause her former neighbors to judge and dismantle her character was incredibly interesting.

"They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking along together like harmony in a song. 

'What she doin coming back here in dem overalls? Can't she find no dress to put on? - Where's dat blue satin dress she left here in? - Where all dat money her husband took and died and left here - What dat ole forty year ole 'oman doin' wid her hair swinging' down her back lak some young gal?' ... The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day." 

- Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, 1937 

And I wanted to finish off with another quote by Hurston that almost gave me shivers with the perfection of the metaphor. "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time."

Thanks to We Heart It for the images.